Unforgettable! The story of the man with no memory

Permanent Present TenseDr Suzanne Corkin 3/5

Surgeons are as prone to fashion as any other professionals, but the consequences can be much more terrible.

In 1940s America, the practice of
scooping out bits and pieces of the brain in order to solve
psychological problems became fashionable among what one might call the
cutting edge of the medical profession.

It was a fashion that lasted well
into the 1950s: in all, 50,000 Americans were lobotomised, often for the
sort of anti-social behaviour which these days might be quelled with an
ASBO.

Henry Molaison became an object of obsessive interest not because he had no memory, but because he had half a memory

One particularly avid surgeon, Walter Freeman, travelled around the country in a vehicle he nicknamed The Lobotomobile.

Over the course of his long career
he managed to clock up 3,000 lobotomies in 23 different states, once
lobotomising 25 women with his trademark ice-pick in a single day.

He could perform the entire operation in about ten minutes.

Freeman was a particularly fanatical
example of this fashion, but there were many other doctors, infinitely
more sane, who subscribed to the same basic idea.

In 1953, a mild-mannered young man,
tall and bespectacled, happened to be suffering from a pretty extreme
form of epilepsy, but nevertheless managed to hold down a job at a
typewriter factory.

For four years, Henry Molaison had
been under the care of a distinguished doctor called William Scoville,
the founder of the Department of Neurosurgery at Hartford Hospital,
Connecticut.

After large doses of drugs failed to improve Henry’s condition, Scoville decided to perform experimental surgery on his brain.

Henry was wheeled, shaven-headed, into the operating theatre.

Using only a local anaesthetic to the
scalp – the brain itself does not have pain sensors – Scoville drilled
two holes into his skull, one-and-a-half inches in diameter and five
inches apart.

He then slipped a neat little
instrument through one hole at a time, and applied suction, so that
pieces of Henry’s brain were sucked out, bit by bit.

Within minutes, the
front half of the hippocampus had been removed, but it might just as
well have been the entire hippocampus, as the rest of it was now
rendered useless.

It wasn’t long after Henry’s operation that Scoville began to sense that all had not gone according to plan.

Henry didn’t recognise his nurses, even though he saw them every day. He could never remember the way to the bathroom.

He didn’t remember that his beloved uncle was dead. And he couldn’t remember anything anyone had said just a few minutes before.

The subtitle of this book calls him
‘the man with no memory’, but this is not strictly true.

Henry could
recognise his parents and other relatives, he could write and speak
perfectly well, and he knew how to perform daily routines, such as
shaving, eating and brushing his teeth.

He loved doing crosswords,
although he was happy to do the same one over and over again, as he had
no memory of ever having seen it before.

If he had really been a ‘man with no
memory’, then the medical profession would never have danced such
attendance on him: he became an object of obsessive interest not because
he had no memory, but because he had half a memory.

This meant he came
to be seen as the key to an understanding of the memory’s different
chambers.

It is almost impossible to overrate
how sought-after he became to the ever-increasing army of doctors,
academics and researchers who would turn up to quiz him and test him.

The author of this book, Suzanne Corkin, who first met Henry when she
joined the MIT Clinical Research Center in 1961, gasps: ‘I had no idea
how famous Henry would become.’

‘His story
began to appear in psychology and neuroscience textbooks in 1970, and by
the 1990s was invoked as a case study in nearly every textbook that
addressed memory,’ writes Corkin.

She remains singularly proprietorial
towards Henry throughout her book, Colonel Parker to his Elvis Presley.

‘I was now in the position of knowing more about Henry than any living
person,’ she boasts.

Towards the end, she excitedly describes his brain
as ‘the most famous brain in the world’.

This is when Henry has just
died, and the brain in question, freshly removed from the corpse, is
about to be cut into 2,401 slices and pickled in some sort of
preservative to be studied by the medical community for decades to come.

Across 50-odd years Henry became, to
all intents and purposes, a living specimen. Between 1966 and 2000 he
was admitted to the Clinical Research Center 55 times, sometimes staying
for a month.

This seems to have given him some sort of purpose in life.

Not only did he enjoy the attention, and completing all the various
memory tests, but he also liked the idea that his work was helping
others.

Much of Corkin’s book is taken up with
descriptions of these tests and experiments.

Scientists who had, up to
then, been forced to make do with rats and snails now found themselves
able to examine a real live human being.

Henry’s unique selling point was
that a particular part of his brain had been removed, containing
specific parts of his memory system.

In all other respects, he was an
intelligent, articulate human being.

Examining him would make the
mysteries of human memory slightly less mysterious, revealing which
parts of the brain were home to which types of memory.

Henry’s memory for events before his
surgery was general rather than specific: attending a high-school
reunion, he couldn’t remember a single name or face.

He had only two particular memories
from his childhood: smoking his first cigarette aged ten, and going up
in an aeroplane aged 13.

Funnily enough, Corkin forgot that he
first told her about this plane ride in 1977, and only remembered it
when she found a transcript of their conversation while preparing to
write this book.

Her own memory in fact seems far from perfect: she repeats herself a number of times in the book.

The book is intended, I suspect, for
students of the brain rather than for the general reader, although it
veers between the two.

Sometimes, Corkin describes complex discoveries in beautifully clear terms, worthy of Bill Bryson, but then she will retreat into the numbing language of techno-speak (‘Top down processes enable us to modulate the impact of diverse sensory information’).

Often, I found myself yearning for sentences of Henry’s resonant clarity: they once found two notes in his pocket, written to remind himself of the bare details of his life.

One said, ‘Dad’s gone’ and the other, ‘Mom’s in nursing home – is in good health’.

But Suzanne Corkin’s own purpose is largely scientific rather than biographical.

She lavishes praise on Henry Molaison, and never tires of saying how sweet, kind, gentle, etc, etc, he was, but never takes her interest in his character to any deeper level.

Indeed, she only seems to get really excited about him when he dies in 2008, and she has to mastermind her seven-year-plan for extracting the brain from his corpse and slicing it up without delay.

‘My colleagues and I had drawn up a flowchart of who needed to be contacted and in what order,’ she reveals.

‘...Seeing Henry’s precious brain in the safety of the metal bowl was one of the most memorable and satisfying moments of my life.

'Our planning for this day had evolved over years, and we pulled it off without a hitch.

'Those of us who witnessed it were elated and smiling; I raised my hands over my head and applauded . . .’

It is at chilling moments like these that one begins to wonder whose brain really needed examining.